Although all of the inputs are neatly clustered at the back on a black plastic strip, as they were before, the M1 Mac mini loses a handful of ports that were available on its two-year-old Intel sibling.įor starters, the new Mac mini has just two Thunderbolt 3 USB-C slots, compared to the Intel version’s four. One of the areas where Apple cut corners to bring down the cost is the port selection. As teardowns revealed, that weight loss is the result of a more closely packed SoC, which we’ll get to in more detail later. Anyone who may need to do something similar, is welcome to copy it.Another minor alteration Apple made is apparent as soon as you take the new Mac mini out of its box: it’s 0.3 pounds lighter. So I do have to connect those items manually if I want to run the old Mac Pro tower as the primary machine (which is not often).

The one thing which would make this operating system even better is if the Mac Keyboard and Mouse worked from the KVM switch as I had intended they would. Usefully, I can launch Photoshop 2022 in either native M1 mode or in Rosetta2 mode when I need to use older filters which have yet to be upgraded to Silicone by their manufacturers. The two Macs connect via Wifi and the integrated Systems are very fast and are working together most effectively. Having checked that all of my peripheral hardware would run in Mac OS 12.1, I have now installed Monterey 12.1 on the MacMini as well. (Apple offered a useful trade-in refund on my 2020 MBPro.) This week I compounded the complexity by installing a new 14' MBPro M1 Pro running on Monterey. MacMini is also set up to work with my BenQ monitor, Intuos tablet, Keyboard, Mouse, Epson Scanner and a couple of Printers.ĭevising the wiring connections so that everything interconnected and fixing matters so that I could get round Apples infuriating Permissions restrictions (in order that I can read and write to any disk from anywhere) took some considerable effort. I configured the new MacMini to access the five internal drives in my 2010 Mac Pro and external HDDs which I use for image back-up storage from an External Dock.

First I bought a MacMini M1 in November so that i could run the new Adobe software natively.

Handbrake for apple m1